Why The USAF Wants To Change How Acquisitions Can Begin

As the Pentagon rolled out its budget request earlier this spring, the U.S. Air Force was circulating its own legislative proposal to the other U.S. military services and the department’s acquisition office to address a concern that had been eating at the Air Force’s top leaders.

Capitol Hill’s legislative process to authorize new acquisition programs is far too slow, especially in an era in which continuing resolutions (CR) are the norm despite a need to rapidly progress to counter China’s expansion, the Air Force says. To quickly develop and buy the systems the military requires, Congress needs to drop some of its authority and let departments get a head start on new start programs, the service contends.

The proposal, crafted within the Air Force, approved by all services, and eventually cleared by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) this month, seeks to expand on existing authorities to allow early stages of acquisitions to begin ahead of congressional approval, says Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary of acquisition, who led the crafting of the proposal.

“This is not a way to get around the Hill’s authorities, but to use processes that are consensus processes between us to get going,” Hunter tells Aerospace DAILY. “And the big barrier really is potentially being under a CR for an extended period of time because what you’re limited from doing under CR is anything that qualifies as a new start.”

Specifically, the proposal would allow the Pentagon to spend up to $300 million per fiscal year to start the early stages of a program—advanced component development, prototypes, risk reduction, system development, demonstration activities up to a preliminary design review (PDR)—without congressional authorization. Congress would then provide its input through the traditional authorization and appropriations process to allow for the acquisition to continue beyond PDR. This would be similar to how the Pentagon can begin urgent operational needs and rapid acquisition of existing technology, but not for service-specific acquisition of things that are not yet developed. 

“Let’s get after the engineering work that we have to do to start to field the capability,” Hunter says. “We won’t actually field the capability until we have full-year authorization with the regular kind of approval processes in place.”

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, in laying out the plan on April 19, pointed to his “operational imperative” model of budgeting. The Air Force laid out seven missions it needs to address in the fiscal 2024 budget, with that work largely being completed last spring. But if Congress does not provide full appropriations and instead relies on a continuing resolution, these new programs could likely not start for another two years. 

Budget documents obtained by Aerospace DAILY list five new-start programs in the request for these imperatives: Procurement of the Kongsberg Joint Strike Missile; a program called Kill Chain Automation for the Advanced Battle Management System; a new program for using F-16s to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft called Project Venom, an experimental operations unit for CCAs; a Space Force program for data transport called meshONE-T; and a classified program for the B-21 family of systems.

Hunter pointed to trying to buy new software to help the kill chain automation as a program that would benefit from the new authority. 

“It is truly a new start. If we’re trying to say, hey, we want to go out and let a new contract with a company to help us with software to close an element of a kill chain or to be able to track targets effectively across multiple parts of a kill chain, which is a very challenging thing to do, then we’re going to have to wait until we get a full year [appropriations] right now,” Hunter says. 

Hunter says the proposal has been in the works since he entered his job about one year ago and has been in Kendall’s mind longer. Before the proposal went to OMB for final approval, the Air Force had to get the other services on board. The U.S. Navy was an “easy sell,” as it sees the same requirements of moving quickly as the Air Force does, Hunter says. There is no opposition from the U.S. Army, which will see the need for it as the service also adopts the “operational imperative” model. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth last month laid out her own set of imperatives following Kendall’s lead. 

After the services were united, the Pentagon’s office of Acquisition and Sustainment changed some of the details. The $300 million amount was originally planned to be higher, but was lowered through the deliberations, Hunter says.

The text of the proposal says that a service secretary needs to notify Congress of the beginning of the early activities with a written determination that there is a “national security requirement” that cannot be delayed until the next budget cycle and details the funding for both current and future years. The individual service leaders will decide to go ahead, with approval from the defense secretary and then notification to the Hill.

“So they still have oversight and control of what we’re doing,” Hunter says of the legislators. “It’s not being done without their awareness. We’re not going to get out ahead of them and do something they don’t want us to do. It’s only essentially engineering work. It’s pretty limited. We’re not committing the government to huge things that we can’t address later if it’s not the right path.”

Hunter argues that the new authority would be so limited that it would only address part of the new start problem and avoids making the Pentagon “so comfortable that people don’t want to pass full-year appropriations bills.” 

For example, even if the Pentagon is able to begin new-start programs early, there is still a problem with programs that it wants to transition in a new budget from research and development to production. If Congress ends up passing a continuing resolution for fiscal 2024, the Air Force is limited to its 2023 budget, which would not include procurement funding for a program in development. 

“CRs are still going to be incredibly uncomfortable,” Hunter says. “We’re still highly incentivized in order to execute our budget to have a full-year appropriations bill. This authority only addresses a very narrow slice of our CR problem.”